Philosophy

We know that concentrations of poverty are disastrous. We know that augmenting the incomes of poor households is not the same thing as helping to grow wealth. We know that we can solve housing problems but unintentionally cause or worsen neighborhood problems. We know that neighborhoods are dynamic, changing all the time, and that they reflect the maze of choices made by individual households. We know that these choices sometimes result in socially efficient outcomes, and sometimes do not.

Yet in spite of all we have learned, we continue to employ doctrinaire planning and design approaches that repeatedly fail to ask hard questions about race and class and culture. We continue to allow the hope for a Utopian perfect to prevent us from marching forcefully towards an achievable good. We continue to see housing problems in the narrow context of supply shortage and supply constraint. We refuse to be intentional about growing demand, about making neighborhoods competitive for households with choices. 

We continue to be blind to the reality that all households have some degree of choice. We do not tackle hard issues of race and class and political power. We invent clichés like Smart Growth to imply that the new Jerusalem is here. And, predictably, we continue to work at the wrong scale on the wrong thing: we chase after any conceivable opportunity to add to our national supply of housing even as we abandon whole sections of readily claimable neighborhoods.

czb was founded to pursue the lost art of urban truth telling. To help communities grow demand in soft neighborhoods, manage demand in transitional neighborhoods, and smartly preserve and add supply in hot markets.